Divination always played an important role in Ancient Near Eastern
politics, daily life, and even economy. Far beyond being a mere mean to
foretell the future, divination sets the standards for the
interpretation of the known world. The interpretation of the omina,
including every sort of natural or man-provoked phenomena, constitutes
one of the main channels of communication between man and the
supernatural forces which shaped the world, i.e. the gods. Hepatoscopy
(liver inspection of offered animals), libanomancy (observation of
incense smoke), lecanomancy (observation of the ripples of the water),
physiognomics (interpretation of the outer appearance of a human body),
celestial omina, and dream interpretation are only a few of the
multifarious branches of divination thoroughly explored in the Ancient
Near Eastern traditions.
Recent years have witnessed a renewed
interest in ancient divinatory practices, which led to the development
of several research projects in universities and research centers in
Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, France, and other
countries. The aim of this international conference is to bring together
a representative group of specialists in the field of Ancient Near
Eastern divination and to start a constructive multi-disciplinary
dialogue. The conference covers a large geographic area including
Mesopotamia, Syria, South Arabia, Anatolia and Egypt from the third
millennium BCE to the Late Antiquity.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
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